Wonder Women

by Fiore, Rosie

  ‘Ealing.’

  ‘Oh, I LOVE Ealing!’ Wouter waved a hand at the barman, who put three cocktails on the bar in front of them. Two tall blond guys floated over. They looked so similar they might have been twins, but Holly noticed they were holding hands. ‘This is Holly!’ said Wouter proudly, as if they’d known each other forever. ‘Look at her dress!’

  The twins admired it and made her stand up and twirl so they could scrutinise every detail. Then Wouter’s boyfriend Andile joined them and soon Holly was in the middle of an admiring crowd of handsome men. Admittedly, none of these handsome men was ever going to fancy her, but it was still fun. The cocktails flowed, and soon the club was full of women too. Some older and clearly very moneyed, some very young and glamorous, and Holly, four cocktails down, had made ten new best friends. The drag show was hilarious, and at 3 a.m. she found herself sitting on the bar with her legs elegantly crossed, singing ‘Happy birthday, Mr President’ to the assembled company. She felt like the most popular girl in the world.

  One of the younger women sidled over and sat on the bar stool beside her. ‘So would you make me a dress like that? A blue one. Like a peacock blue?’ Her friend, a buxom and glamorous redhead, elbowed her aside. ‘I want one too. But longer, I think, and maybe strapless? Could you do it? I’ve got a work party next month and I want something stunning to wear.’

  ‘I could, I suppose …’ said Holly doubtfully. Where would she find the time to make two dresses from scratch?

  ‘I’m happy to pay …’ said the first girl, and named a figure that made Holly gasp. It was a week’s wages in the shop.

  Wouter had been listening in, and he said firmly, ‘You’re going to have to go into business, Holly, my treasure. You need a stall at the Rosebank Market, and you’ll make a fortune!’

  ‘The Rosebank Market?’

  ‘We’ll take you tomorrow.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Today.’

  What with the late night and the hangover, Holly, Pierre and Wouter didn’t get going until lunchtime. The market was a large, busy affair held on the rooftop of a shopping centre. There were stalls selling African crafts and gourmet foods, but also many selling handmade clothes of all types: kids’ and babies’ outfits, T-shirts and funky summer frocks. Holly didn’t see a stall selling evening wear, but she could see people weren’t shy to spend.

  They went for a cappuccino when they left the market, and as Wouter and Pierre chatted, Holly stared wistfully into the middle distance. Her own clothing line … It could work. It really could. If only she had the money and time to get the whole thing going. Then Pierre reached over and touched her hand. ‘So here’s our offer.’

  ‘What offer?’

  ‘Wouter and me have been talking. If you think you could make enough clothes to get a stall going, we’ll lend you the money to get material and stuff. And Wouter knows the manager of the market, so he can probably get you a stand when you’re ready.’

  It was so crazy, so generous and so sweet Holly didn’t know what to say. If the boys had faith in her, she’d just have to find the time. Evenings, weekends, early mornings … she’d make it happen.

  ‘We also have a name for the clothing line, if you like,’ said Wouter proudly. ‘Doradolla.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It means “fag hag” in Afrikaans.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Holly. ‘Doradolla – high-camp fashion.’

  She spent evenings and late into the night that week sketching dresses, blouses and skirts, and drawing up patterns. Early on Saturday morning, she and Pierre headed for the Oriental Plaza and trawled through every fabric shop. Upstairs, down an obscure little alleyway, they found a tiny shop full of satins, velvets and brocades, and Holly chose six or seven fabrics that seemed right for her designs. As luck would have it, they found a Shantung faux silk in a gorgeous peacock blue, perfect for her first two commissions.

  It took her six weeks of sewing every night and all weekend to make enough stock so that her stall wouldn’t be look too sad and empty. She found a shop-fitting warehouse in an industrial area and bought two clothing rails cheap, and hunting around a junk yard was thrilled to find a pair of 1950s shop mannequins. One evening, Pierre excitedly presented her with a box of labels that he had had made, with the Doradolla logo sewn on to them and space to add the size of the garment in permanent ink. She stitched them in, steamed and pressed each item and hung them up. Her room looked like some kind of mad rainbow and sequin explosion, but Holly had to admit she was rather proud of what she’d created.

  Early the next morning, Pierre drove her to Rosebank, his car piled high with her stock and the rails. The two mannequins sat in the back seat like a pair of sentinels. It didn’t take her long to set up, but once she was done, Holly felt a lot less confident. There were so many clothing stalls, and what had looked like a lot of clothing in her room looked pitifully sparse in this enormous space. Pierre brought her a cup of coffee, and she stood shivering in the unseasonably cold morning. She wanted to go home and crawl into her bed. This was a crazy idea. It would never work. She’d sewn her fingers raw, and now she owed Pierre and Wouter thousands of rand.

  Her gloom was justified. She didn’t sell a thing all morning. People walked past her stall and glanced in, and a few people came in and fingered the dresses, asked the prices and moved on. Holly was glad Pierre had had to leave to go to lunch with his parents … she wouldn’t have wanted him to stand there, hour after hour, and see her fail. She would have packed up and gone home if she could, but she had no car; she’d have to wait for her lift when Pierre came back.

  But then, after lunch, something changed. The crowds seemed more relaxed, more inclined to spend longer browsing, happier to part with money. Two teenage girls came and tried on a few dresses, giggling and taking pictures of each other with their phones. It attracted more people to the stall, and suddenly Holly had four or five people leafing through her stock. Then one of the teenagers reached into her purse and brought out some crumpled notes to buy a pretty red and white spotted blouse with a pussy-bow neckline, and Holly had made her first sale. She fought hard to be nonchalant and resisted the urge to kiss and hug the girl. It didn’t start a flood, but there was a determined little trickle. By the end of the day, she had sold one dress, three blouses and a skirt. She’d covered the cost of the stall for the day and made a little more. She’d learned that she needed a bigger changing-room facility than the flimsy screens she’d set up, and that the retro office wear sold better than the evening dresses. If someone asked her to define her mood, she would have said, ‘Cautiously optimistic.’

  That was, of course, until she went to work the next day, when Susanna met her at the door with pursed lips. ‘What’s this I hear about you opening a stall at the flea market?’

  ‘Er … yes,’ Holly said tentatively. ‘I made a few things to sell.’

  ‘Evening wear?’

  ‘Some of it.’

  ‘So you’ve set up in direct competition with this shop?’

  ‘No!’ said Holly, outraged. ‘This stuff is all couture. I just made a few frocks …’

  ‘On our sewing machine, I suppose.’

  Holly had no answer for that.

  ‘Pack up anything you have in the back. You can work today as you’re here, and I’ll pay you till the end of this week.’

  It took Holly a full minute to work out that she had just been fired. She was outraged, but in the same moment knew she had no recourse, as she’d been working illegally anyway. She stood tall, walked into the back of the shop and collected the few belongings she’d left there. As she came back into the front of the shop, a customer was pleading with Susanna to get a dress altered in time for a function in two days’ time. Susanna turned smoothly to Holly and said, ‘Holly, dear, do you have time to take up the hem on Mrs Pienaar’s gown today?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Holly, ‘because I’ve just been fired. But, Mrs Pienaar, if you’d like a bespoke dress made in time for your event
, please call me.’ She handed the woman one of the cards Pierre had printed for her, picked up her bag and walked out. It was a small victory, and she got no comfort from it at all when she got back to the quiet, empty house and lay on her bed sobbing. No job, next to no money, and now no sewing machine. Things were not good.

  After a good cry, a nap, a hot bath and a peanut-butter sandwich, however, Holly felt a little better, and ready to fight back. Her mum had given her a credit card when she left to go travelling. ‘It’s for emergencies,’ she had said over and over again, ‘real emergencies.’ Well, as far as Holly could tell, owing two new friends a lot of money and having no way to pay it back except sewing was an emergency. She got online and looked at the price of second-hand sewing machines. On the Gumtree local website she found one similar to the one she’d been using, and rang the seller. He was happy to hold the machine for her for a few hours. She went to the bank, drew out the necessary cash and took a taxi to the seller’s house. As soon as she got home, she set about making a few more blouses in a wider range of sizes and altering a couple of the dresses that hadn’t sold at the market.

  She carried on throughout the week, buying a little more fabric on her mum’s credit card and making carefully chosen items. She gathered names from Pierre and the few other friends she had made, and sent out a mass email encouraging people to visit her stall at the market that Sunday and offering a ten-per-cent discount. She didn’t give herself time to think about the enormity of the gamble she was taking. She just worked.

  Sunday dawned, and her fear and trepidation increased a thousand-fold. The stall looked better than it had the week before, that was for sure, but the stakes were so much higher. She was less concerned that the morning was quiet, remembering the last time, but she began to get antsy as soon as lunchtime came. Just as she was about to panic, a girl she vaguely remembered from the night of the drag show came over. ‘I’m looking for something for a hot date tonight,’ she said. ‘Pierre said you could sort me out with something glamorous.’

  She was small and slim with white-blonde hair, and Holly knew just the thing. She had made a strapless, knee-length dress in a bright emerald green that would be a perfect fit. The girl looked dubious when Holly brought it out, but she tried it on. When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she stared at herself for ages. ‘It’s amazing!’ she breathed. ‘I’d never have chosen this colour, but it really works!’

  The dress wasn’t cheap, and Holly prayed silently that the girl would take it. She did, and a flirty miniskirt in neon pink. After that, the floodgates opened. Holly was kept running around for the rest of the day, and even when the market was closing up, she was still selling. She’d brought needle and thread so she could make minor adjustments to clothes if they needed it, and that proved a big draw too. She also took a few orders for items in different sizes, and those people had been perfectly happy to pay a deposit. As the afternoon flew by, she was too busy to keep track of the money she tucked into her money belt, so it wasn’t until she and Pierre were sitting in a bar, sipping cold beers, that she dared count it.

  It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough. She could pay her mum back the money she’d spent on the credit card, give Pierre an instalment of the money he’d invested and put aside enough for her rent, which was due the next week. It was a start.

  She needed to be more self-sufficient, so she took driving lessons, got her licence and bought a second-hand estate car, which the South Africans called a ‘station wagon’, like the Americans do. It made her more independent and meant she could travel to suppliers and to the market without Pierre’s help. It wasn’t an easy life: she worked long, long hours and her income was very erratic, but somehow, month after month, she met her expenses. She wasn’t saving anything, so her travel plans seemed, for the moment, to have been shelved. With Pierre’s encouragement, she sought permission to stay legally in South Africa, and set up a bank account and a legal business entity.

  Once she was mobile she became a little more adventurous. She found a couple of other flea markets around Johannesburg where she could get a stall on other days of the week. As demand increased, she needed someone to help with the sewing. She spoke to Portia, the domestic worker who looked after their house, and she recommended a friend of hers who was a talented seamstress. Phumi was a broad, sturdy woman with quick, capable hands, who could assemble and press a garment in half the time it took Holly. She also knew some very reasonable fabric suppliers, and business began, if not to boom, at least to rattle along.

  One morning, Holly woke up and realised she had been in Johannesburg for three years. It was home. She hadn’t consciously admitted it up till now, but she definitely wouldn’t be heading off to travel up Africa any time soon. She was twenty-three, doing work she liked and she had a great crowd of friends. She loved the sunshine and the lifestyle, so different from grim, grey, rainy London. She loved the big airy house she lived in. She couldn’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else.

  Some of her clients suggested that she might want to set up a shop, but she quite liked the itinerant life of the fleamarket stallholder. She did, however, approach a few trendy boutiques to see if they would like to stock some of her stuff, and a couple said yes. It gave another arm to her business and she enjoyed making things she didn’t actually have to sell herself. She also hired a couple of well-spoken, willing young students to sell at the market on days she couldn’t or didn’t want to attend, and allowed herself the odd weekend off or night out.

  She was so busy that there was little time in her life for romance. She met a lot of people at the markets, and she’d had a few short-lived flings with other stallholders and once with a busking musician, but she hadn’t met anyone that rocked her world. Until Damon.

  She had gone out for the evening with a crowd of mates to a trendy jazz bar in Melville. A Brazilian band was playing and the vibe was steamy and exciting. She was wearing a sexy little ice-blue dress she’d made herself: close-fitting and shimmery. She had a great tan and her short, curly hair was shiny and unruly. She knew she looked like a million dollars. The guy standing at the bar, however, looked like a million and a half. He was taller than her despite her heels, blond and handsome, and he had that easy confidence that comes either from being very, very rich, very successful or extremely well endowed. As it turned out, it was all three. She had muscled her way up to the bar to get a drink and he turned and looked at her, smiled lazily and gestured to the barman. He was one of those guys who got served instantly. He leaned over the bar and spoke quietly to the barman, who produced a bottle of champagne and an ice bucket from nowhere, which he handed to him along with two glasses. No money changed hands. The handsome man took Holly’s hand and led her to a small table towards the back of the bar. They had not spoken, and she didn’t even know his name. He hadn’t bothered to find out her name or who she was with. At the time, she had found his arrogance quite thrilling.

  Oblivious to the noise of the band, they talked intensely for three straight hours. He was a property developer, of Afrikaans descent. He was successful, articulate and well read. He told her he had gone to university in Edinburgh and had spent two years travelling the world. He’d hitchhiked through South America, and had backpacked through Southeast Asia. He was fascinated by the story of her clothing line and how she had started it from nothing, and asked lots of probing questions about her plans to expand. She wasn’t all that interested in talking about it, to be fair, especially once they had finished the bottle of champagne and another had appeared, and he was somehow holding her hand across the table. She kept staring at his unbelievably handsome face in the candlelight. She had forgotten all about her friends at the next table, and she was vaguely aware that she was way too drunk to drive home. She thanked the heavens that she’d arranged for her student helpers to run the stall the next day. There was no way she was going to be ready for a 7 a.m. start and heaving boxes of clothes.

  The bar gradually emptied around them. Holly’s friends
came over to say goodbye and left. She had stopped drinking, but she felt drunk on desire. She didn’t want to get up from the table and break the spell of this amazing evening, but Damon abruptly stood and took her hand. ‘You’ll come back to my place,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question. Holly nodded, and they headed for the door. She stopped suddenly. ‘The bill! We didn’t pay the bill!’

  ‘I own the bar,’ said Damon shortly. ‘I’ve paid for that champagne once. I’m not paying for it again.’

  *

  Damon’s house was quite insanely luxurious; in fact it could only be called a mansion. It was short drive from the bar, on the crest of nearby Northcliff Hill. Holly gazed around, intimidated, at the great marble staircase and the atrium, which seemed the size of a football pitch and opened out on to a pool that looked roughly Olympic size. She didn’t get much time to sightsee though, as Damon matter-of-factly unzipped her dress and let it fall to the floor.

  They didn’t sleep that night. Holly saw the sun rise as Damon did delightful things to her as she reclined on a lounger by the pool. He’d already ravished her halfway up the stairs, on his king-size bed and in the shower, before announcing it was time for an early-morning swim. Swimming was not what he had in mind though, or at least not yet, as he lay Holly down on a lounger the size of a double bed, spread her legs gently and began to pleasure her with his mouth and fingers. She gazed dreamily out over the view of the city, her body tingling and aching delightfully. It didn’t get better than this, surely. This was as fabulous as life got.

  But things were set to get a lot better, she discovered. Damon literally swept her into his life. She didn’t go back to sleep in the house she shared with Pierre again. She worked there during the day, and made occasional trips to collect clothing, until after a few weeks, Damon sent a van to move all her stuff to his house. He paid off the remainder of her rent for the year, so Pierre got to keep the house to himself. He set her up to work in a big airy room at the back of his house, with room for clothing rails, cutting tables and the machines she and Phumi used.